The word “Hatzola” is Hebrew for “salvation.” This is a fact that I imagine most people in the UK – even many Jews, myself included – did not know before yesterday. They know now. For a few days at least, the name of the Hatzola organization in north London, a volunteer-run ambulance service that cares for the local community, will be in the headlines, thanks to an arsonist who set fire to four ambulances in Golders Green in the early hours of Monday morning. And then it will be forgotten.
Here are some more facts about Hatzola. The organization was first established in New York in the 1960s to serve the Jewish community, but soon spread to other countries. It is one of the largest voluntary ambulance services in the world. While it is a Jewish-led organization, it offers its services to anyone in need in the local area. The Talmud – the compendium of Jewish law and scripture – teaches that “to save a life is to save a world.” Hatzola is the embodiment of this principle that nothing matters more than human life, Jew or Gentile. Orthodox Jewish volunteers will break the Sabbath if called for an emergency. When planes struck the Twin Towers on September 11, 2001, Hatzola members were among the first responders on the scene. During the Covid-19 pandemic, Hatzola volunteers helped transport patients and helped spread the vaccine in the UK.
There are six chapters in the UK. The north west London branch, which was targeted on Monday, serves the areas of Hendon, Golders Green, Finchley, Mill Hill, Hampstead and Colindale. As well as being home to the epicenter of British Jewry, these areas are home to large communities of people of Indian, Bangladeshi, Romanian, Cypriot and Japanese heritage – plus many more. Hatzola is there for all of them, including the hundreds of Iranians who took to the streets of Finchley and beyond to celebrate the death of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei in March.
A terrorist group linked to Iran has claimed responsibility for the attack, although no one has been arrested so far and nothing has been confirmed. Whoever they were, I doubt the individuals who chose to set out in the middle of the night to set fire to the ambulances knew much about the history of Hatzola. I doubt they would have cared, just as they didn’t care that the ambulances were in a residential area and that the explosions caused by the ignition of the oxygen cylinders broke the windows of the nearby apartments and could have caused casualties. Targeting a Jewish ambulance service, in a Jewish area, near a Jewish synagogue – it’s not hard to imagine what was going through their minds. This was, as Keir Starmer put it, a “terrible anti-Semitic attack”.
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Terrible, yes. Surprising? No, not really, not anymore. Not for Jews, anyway. We are accustomed to the reality that here in Britain – as in other countries – there are people who not only wish us harm, but feel emboldened by global events to translate this wish into action. Graffiti on Jewish businesses, vandalism of Jewish schools, an escalation of threats against synagogues and Jewish community centers – since the October 7 attacks and the war in Gaza, the Jewish diaspora around the world has been on high alert, watching in despair as the actions of a government thousands of miles from home have become a terrifying anti-ext here.
More than 1,000 anti-Semitic hate crimes were reported in London in the last 12 months. A shul in Manchester was targeted on Yom Kippur, the holiest day of the Jewish calendar. A Chanukah beach party was marred by gunfire in Sydney, killing 15 people, including a ten-year-old girl. Neither had anything to do with Israel, the Netanyahu government or the IDF. However, it wasn’t long before the excuses started pouring in. Yes, it was tragic that a child had died, but think of the children who were dying in Gaza. Bondi Beach is 9,000 miles from Palestine. But Jews are Jews. And for antisemites, for people who understand what “globalization of the Intifada” really means, a Jewish life taken in one part of the world is as good as another. Ultimately, the goal is to wipe us off the face of the planet.
If this particular fire was gradually extinguished after the declaration of a ceasefire and fragile peace plan in Gaza in October, the Israeli-US attacks on Iran have poured gasoline on the embers. In the last two weeks alone, we have seen explosions at a synagogue in Belgium and a Jewish school in the Netherlands. Anti-Semitism also manifests itself in other, less violent ways. Last week, a report by the Union of Jewish Students found that one in five UK university students would be reluctant to have a Jewish housemate. What this actually means is that one in five feel comfortable revealing their anti-Jewish prejudice in a poll – one can assume the real figure is higher. Would those students be happy to admit that they would not want to share a house with a Muslim, or a Hindu, or a black, brown, or Asian student? Or are they simply Jews who have been taught that it is acceptable to despise them? Again, they weren’t asked about the Israelis (although one wonders why hatred of a country’s government extends to hatred of its own people when it comes to Israel, but not, say, when it comes to China’s treatment of the Uighurs). They were asked about the Jews.
So it is appalling but not surprising that ambulances run by the Jewish community were burnt down in Golders Green. And terrible, but not surprising, too, that the excuses keep coming. It took four minutes for me to post on social media about how this was an attack on Jews for the first comment to reveal that it was all Netanyahu’s fault. At the time of writing, my mentions are full of accusations of genocide, Zionist expansionism, Israeli war crimes and US imperialism.
In north London, Jews are used to getting on. The day after the Bondi Beach shooting, I turned up at Golders Green and noticed the increased security at the station, led by volunteers of course. The community wanted to make sure no one was hurt at that evening’s Chanukah celebration. They wanted to keep us safe. As Peter Zinkin, a councilor for Golders Green, said today: “Unfortunately, we are good at disaster. The issue is how to stop disaster from happening in the first place.” More police, more security can only go so far. Until we recognize this violence for what it is, see through the excuses and events that uniquely occur when Jews are attacked, there will be more shootings, more stabbings, more arson incidents. We will be horrified every time. We will not be surprised.
“Our phones have not stopped,” Hatzola representative Laurence Blitz declared today. “Our volunteers are responding to calls and our service continues uninterrupted.” Hatzola is still operating, ready to serve the entire community of north London, regardless of which god they may or may not believe in. “To save a life is to save a world.”
(Further reading: How Covid fears shaped the meningitis response)
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